Already after the first session we visited a facility of the client company Espericare, Villa Niemi, in Nokia. We got impressions of the facilities, took pictures, drew a floor plan of the area users inhabit and interviewed the staff and residents. We would return later to do more structured interviews and perform a test with paper prototypes.
Then own our own we looked at existing market solutions, concepts of entertainment and ways to spend time with people with memory diseases. An interesting idea was reminiscence therapy. A form of therapy that has been shown to improve the attitude of caregivers towards their patients. This is assumed to be due to caregivers’ increased knowledge of their patients’ backgrounds and personalities. Often in care homes, the turnover of personnel is quite high, which makes the need of a tool for such familiarization even more pressing.
In our vision, as a result of well-performed care, the elderly are surrounded by people who know them by their individual qualities, not just by their diagnoses. Every day brings the elderly meaningful interaction and positive moments that include a caring human contact.
Key takeways from location visits, interviews and user needs
Residents are not able to tell about themselves so nurses have a hard time to get to know them and their history. Introduction to new nurses about the resident’s preferences is relies almost completely to coffeetabletalk. Family and friends of the residents want to do something for the resident’s benefit. It was hard for the nurses to get the residents excited about existing entertainment and stimuli options. Stimuli session should be something that is quickly started, because time to perform stimulus is scattered in to small time windows during shifts. Some of the residents were in poor health and spend most of their time in their own rooms.
Preferences of Residents
- Music, listened and sung
- Doing things together, interacting
- Telling about themselves
- Remeniscing about the times past and looking at old pictures
- Looking pictures of children and animals
- Watching TV, different subject matter preferences
Things that came up in the research:- Dementia/Alzheimer diseases increasing and growing concern about quality of health care systems
- Elderly adults suffering dementia/Alzheimer diseases require brain-activating stimulus and entertainment
- Nurses don’t have sufficient time to engage individually and it’s difficult to get patients excited in common activities